The human decision-making process, Boyd argues, deals with this conundrum through a constant dialectic of creation and destruction of mental patterns and perceptions in response to a changing and complex observed reality. We cannot escape from chaos, rather we are most successful when we embrace it by shattering the rigid mental patterns that have built up and then synthesize the new realities we observe to create a new understanding. Such a process of structuring, dissolving, restructuring, and dissolving again must be repeated endlessly.

This series has attempted to highlight that no matter how well analyzed, no matter the length or the depth of discussion, no matter how well addressed in writing by a Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Winston Churchill, or Sir John Keegan, et al, success in war and warfare, must always be seen in light of “an evolving, open ended, far from equilibrium process of self-organization, emergence, and natural selection.” Those words from John Boyd’s last effort, Essence of Winning and Losing, seem a perfect match with the original question from Napoleonic times. The mismatch of “labels” with events and resultant ill-formed actions as described in these posts by multiple writers and analysts, would seem to signify the importance of answering the question, what kind of war is it, and the crucial need for destruction and creation – analysis with synthesis.

As this series draws to a close, Science, defence and stategy, by Adam Elkus, was recognized and excerpts selected as striking this issue point on. The full article can be found at the website openSecurity.

Adam Elkus is a past PWH contributor as co-author with John Sullivan of the Operational Art for Policing series (EEI#9). He is an analyst specializing in foreign policy and security. His articles have been published in West Point CTC Sentinel, Small Wars Journal, Defense and the National Interest, Foreign Policy in Focus, Red Team Journal, , and other publications. His Blog writing can be found at Rethinking Security and at GroupIntel Network where he hosts the Group Boyd, 4GW Theory, and Criminal Insurgency.

Science, defence and strategy; (excerpt)

by Adam Elkus

War has always been such a tremendously complex undertaking that every force waging it has sought to simplify and standardize. At the same time, this simplification and standardization is usually inimical to the kind of creativity needed to win. Finding a balance between the art and science of war has always been difficult, especially in an era thoroughly dominated by science in all major areas of everyday life.

Some critics charge that counterinsurgency has become a new “progressive” science of war rooted in an application of social sciences to conflict. While this charge has some truth, the real issue is that science is being substituted for strategy. Without guiding strategic direction, the temptation to elevate pat formulas and simplistic doctrines becomes overwhelming.

… Critics of American counterinsurgency (COIN) theory have often charged that it is a new “science of war” rooted not in systems analysis or technobabble but “progressive” sciences such as anthropology or sociology (See Edward Luttwak, “Dead End: Counterinsurgency as Military Malpractice,” Harper’s, February 2007 or Gian P. Gentile, “A Strategy of Tactics: Population-centric COIN and the Army,” Parameters, Autumn 2009). There is truth in this charge, though more so in the political than purely military arena. Charges to intervene in Yemen and ritualistic calls to pacify every “ungoverned space” with a combination of development and surgically applied force show that policy elites have misunderstood both the nature of counterinsurgency warfare as well as the relationship between operations and strategy.

The issue is not necessarily the merits of counterinsurgency or conventional warfare, but the substitution of science for strategy. The post-Cold War strategic vacuum of American grand strategy allows vacuous concepts and management-speak to take the place of detailed strategic plans and concepts. Everyone is favor of “smart power” and the “whole of government approach” for example, but no one agrees about how to properly implement such concepts.

… For the military, the quest for doctrine and training adaptive enough to create a military capable of carrying out complex conventional and irregular missions is likely to be a decades-long pursuit. It took thirty years for the Army to experience a post-Vietnam renaissance in doctrine and training that would eventually result in the lopsided victory over Iraq in the first Gulf War. But military needs will be ultimately driven by the nature of American strategy. And when strategy is absent, science, whether rooted in technology, operational art, or social science, will take over. So what is to be done?

One of America’s greatest (but little-known) strategic thinkers ironically found the answer in science itself. Air Force Colonel John Boyd busied himself with an expansive reading list after retirement, synthesizing insights from the emerging discipline complexity science along with the timeless lessons of classic military history. An iconoclastic figure, Boyd is known for declaring “If you’ve got one doctrine, you’re a dinosaur.” While Boyd’s insights are often reduced down to the idea that one should simply be faster than the enemy, his real ideas were far more complex.

In Boyd’s paper “Destruction and Creation,” the widely read Colonel synthesized mathematicians Kurt Gödel and Werner Heisenberg’s insights in pointing out that inward-oriented efforts to force observed reality to mesh with internally derived concepts only increase chaos and destruction. It is impossible to determine the consistency and character of an abstract system within itself (See John R. Boyd, “Destruction and Creation,” September 3, 1976). Boyd noted that this had potentially dire consequences for rigid closed systems:

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all observed natural processes generate entropy. From this law it follows that entropy must increase in any closed system—or, for that matter, in any system that cannot communicate in an ordered fashion with other systems or environments external to itself. Accordingly, whenever we attempt to do work or take action inside such a system—a concept and its match-up with reality—we should anticipate an increase in entropy hence an increase in confusion and disorder. Naturally, this means we cannot determine the character or nature (consistency) of such a system within itself, since the system is moving irreversibly toward a higher, yet unknown, state of confusion and disorder. …Furthermore, unless some kind of relief is available, we can expect confusion to increase until disorder approaches chaos— death.

The human decision-making process, Boyd argues, deals with this conundrum through a constant dialectic of creation and destruction of mental patterns and perceptions in response to a changing and complex observed reality. We cannot escape from chaos, rather we are most successful when we embrace it by shattering the rigid mental patterns that have built up and then synthesize the new realities we observe to create a new understanding. Such a process of structuring, dissolving, restructuring, and dissolving again must be repeated endlessly.

Contemporary American strategic problems flow from the fact that we cannot adjust the ossified thinking of Washington D.C. to the constantly shifting observed reality of the outside world. A failure to match concepts to observed reality has amplified the already formidable entropy of the American political system. The corresponding failure to make strategy results in a search further inward towards the “science” of war. Better strategy will come about only when the process by which strategy is made becomes supple, flexible, and less dominated by sacred cows and special interests.

Critics of American foreign policy often undermine their own case with conspiracy theorizing about the “military-industrial complex.” The real problem, however, is not James Bond villain-style secret plans and hidden agendas but basic human frailty. A largely homogenous group of people is not going to have all the answers to questions of war and peace because they are necessarily limited by their experience, specialization, and biases.

Widening the circle of discussion is a necessary step for improving American strategy. Largely absent, for example, from the uninformed debate about counter-terrorism measures in Yemen are regional experts who have studied, lived, or worked in the region. Another happy outcome would be the breaking of the political double standard that marks skeptics of intervention abroad as “unserious” and grants the aura of statesmanship to those who reflexively call to send in the Marines. Until the process of conceiving strategy is characterized more by “destruction and creation” than closed debate, the science of war will continue to substitute for realistic strategy.